Speaker Biographies – Feature Sessions - London, Spring 2018

Winston Carrera, Chief Technologist, Future Networks, BT Global Services
Winston is CTO in BTs Global Services division focused on Future Networks. A business technologist with over 30 years’ experience driving innovation in Financial Services across all 7 layers of the OSI stack. Providing thought leadership and guidance on the exploitation of future network and systems technology in the LAN, MAN, WAN, Data Centre and Cloud to digitally transform the Enterprise in alignment with business strategy and or regulatory requirements. Influential in the down streaming of innovation into BT’s global portfolio, providing customer, industry and technology insight to steer portfolio investments and evolution on future network products and propositions spanning multiple industry verticals.

Gaurav Chakravorty, Co-Founder, Qplum. Gaurav is co-founder and Head of Strategy Development at qplum. Qplum is a digital wealth management firm that specializes in family offices and HNWI. Qplum also works with endowment funds and pension funds to provide outsourced asset management services that integrate with their in-house technology. Gaurav has been one of the early pioneers in machine learning based high-frequency trading. He built the most profitable algo-trading group at Tower Research from 2005-2010 and was the youngest partner in the firm.

Steve Colwill, CEO, Velocimetrics
Steve has over 25 years of financial services experience both as a software architect and senior manager. 15 years was spent building high volume, real-time FX, fixed income and equity pricing, risk and trading systems for tier 1 investment banks. In 2009 he established Velocimetrics to measure and monitor latency in the high frequency trading market. Since then the company has grown, organically, to be able to deliver high quality data insight at the business flow, as well, as the infrastructure and application layers, with real-time tracking of business data from front-office to back-office.

Michel Debiche, Guest Analyst, STAC.Michel is both quant and technologist, whose passion is making data science actually work for financial firms. He is currently leading the expansion of the STAC community to include more buyside firms looking to leapfrog to the best technologies and Analytics Ops processes for quant/quantamental investing. Prior to STAC, Michel re-engineered strategy development and implementation at numerous firms, first as a quant, then as a consultant. Employers include CSFB, Daiwa, First New York, CIBC, and Think Big Analytics, where he led the financial services practice. Michel has BS, MS, and PhD degrees in geophysics from Stanford and Princeton Universities.

Terry Fisher, European Sales Leader, HPC Cloud, IBM.
Terry is the European Sales Leader for HPC for the Systems Division of IBM, and is based in the UK. As a 26 Year IT veteran, having previously worked at global technology vendors such as LG and Cisco, Mid Tier Resellers and part of forming 2 start-up businesses, he brings broad experience and powerful insight across many different technology disciplines and industries. He led expansion of the Platform Computing Channel Business in EMEA, and then led the subsequent channel integration of Platform Computing into IBM as part of the 2012 acquisition. His current role is leading the sales of IBM Spectrum Computing’s new generation of HPC, Analytics and AI/ML solutions to industry and research clients.

Ken Furnanz, Business Development, Intel.
Ken leads the EMEA business development efforts for Intel’s Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group. He focuses on creating value around solutions that exploit Intel’s Optane™ Memory technology and 3D-NAND SSDs. Ken has over 20 years of industry experience developing solutions encompassing compute, networking and storage through his career spanning positions at Intel, QLogic and various startups.

Dr Matthew Grosvenor, Senior Systems Engineer, Exablaze.
Matthew is a Senior Systems Engineer at Exablaze. He's been working with the Exablaze family of companies for over 8 years. In that time, he has been involved in trading strategy development, market data acquisition, FPGA acceleration, systems optimisation, and measurement and analytics. Matthew holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge. His research work focused on techniques for managing and mitigating latency variance in hyper-scale datacenter networks. He continues to publish widely in the fields of big-data, hyperscale datacenters, networks, latency and network measurement.

Ciaran Kennedy, Global CSO, Metamako.
Ciaran Kennedy is the Chief Sales Officer at Metamako, leading the global expansion and business development efforts of the low-latency, FPGA-enabled network equipment provider. After studying Software Engineering at Ulster University, Ciaran joined Kainos Software as an engineer. He then spent ten years working at Wombat Financial Software where he held several key roles. Post-acquisition by NYSE, Ciaran took on the role of VP of Global Solutions Delivery and later became COO of the Wombat division looking after the day-to-day business operations. During his 15 years in financial technology, he has gained immense exposure to the latest low-latency trading systems and financial exchange architectures.

Peter Lankford, Founder & Director, Securities Technology Analysis Center.
Peter leads STAC®, which provides hands-on technology research and testing tools to the finance industry and facilitates the STAC Benchmark Council™, a group of leading financial institutions and vendors that engages in technical dialog and specifies standard ways to assess technologies used in finance. Prior to STAC, Peter was SVP of the $240M market data technology business at Reuters. Prior to Reuters, Peter held management positions at Citibank, First Chicago Corp., and operating-system maker IGC. Peter has an MBA, Masters in International Relations, and Bachelors in Chemistry from the University of Chicago.

Jason McGuiness, Consultant, Count Zero Ltd.
Jason is a consultant in C++ on Linux. With over 15 years' experience, including programming prototype super-computers, but mainly in finance, now focusing on low-latency and HFT software and architectures and the issues arising from them. He is also actively involved with the UK C++ Panel of the BSI (British Standards Institute) and the ACCU to maintain his skill-set.

Pat Mead, Business Development EMEA - Datacenter and acceleration, Intel.
Pat Mead is the EMEA business development manager for datacenter and acceleration within Intel’s programmable solutions group. Pat joined Intel in in 2015 following Intel’s acquisition of Altera Corporation. Pat joined Altera in 1999 and held management roles in marketing, business development, technical management and global sales. Prior to Altera Pat worked for Lucent, Fujitsu and Marconi in technology and engineering roles. Pat earned a BSc (Hons) degree in Electrical and Electronic engineering from the University of Kent.

Matt Meinel, SVP Solutions Engineering, Sales and Business Development, Levyx
Matt is a veteran innovator / entrepreneur in Capital Markets financial technology. He has been a key player at several successful, innovative financial technology firms including: Co-founder at startup 29West (low latency messaging technology) which exited to Informatica; RedHat CIO during transition period to the now popular subscription business model; Principal at O’Connor & Associates (bought by Swiss Bank which was acquired by UBS Investment Bank). At Swiss Bank he served as co-CIO and later at UBS Investment bank was Global Head of IT for the Fixed Income & Treasury Division.

Anthony Warden, Global Head Equities Low-touch Technology, Citi.
Anthony has over 20 years of experience in technology for algorithmic trading and direct market access. At Citi he is responsible for the firm's equities algorithmic execution technology as well as all cash equities technology in EMEA. Prior to Citi, Anthony had global responsibility at JP Morgan Chase for equities data and analytics technology along with EMEA equities execution technology. For several years before that, was responsible for algorithmic trading technology and exchange connectivity at Lehman Brothers, then Nomura. Anthony has a BSc honors in Computing from Brunel University.

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